Thursday, April 30, 2015

After seeing and hearing about the riots in Baltimore on the news, I'm becoming more convinced that body cameras on cops is a good idea. Now this isn't to say that all cops are racist, as most aren't and aren't selective about how they enforce the law. For the unfortunate few that are, this will weed them out, as they're the ones that give law enforcement a bad name.

Sunday, April 26, 2015

For all my rants on here about how the Koch Brothers are the biggest source of mass suffering here in America, well here's something solid to back that up. The post enclosed is what I wrote on Daily Kos (you can subscribe to me here) after seeing an article on PoliticusUSA documenting that Greenpeace USA discovered malfeasance on the part of the Koch Brothers as per a FOIA request and made a request to the IRS to investigate, via this letter, whether the Charles G. Koch Foundation violated IRS regulations specifically banning political lobbying and campaigning for specific political candidates. This is what the Koch Brothers are notorious for doing when it comes to the GOP;s candidates for public office.

Anyway, the IRS has told Greenpeace that if they turn over more documentation they'll start to investigate. This is a good thing, for all of us. It's not just from an environmental stand-point, it's also from a political stand-point as well. Not because it will crush the Republicans and help the Democrats, it will allow our political culture to remain intact without creating an oligarchy. We've had this happen thrice in our nation's history. The first 2 are called the Gilded Age and the Roaring 20s, the last being the lost decades (1980s, 1990s, 2000s) due to Reganomics (supply-side economics). If this proves anything, it proves that conservatism is a big lie when fully revealed and is only meant to help those at the very top of the income bracket or can be used as a means to launch a campaign of violent hate (i.e., culture wars).

Now in terms of keeping our political culture intact, it will diminish any more attempts by the Kochs, via the American Legislative Exchange Council, to introduce more vote-suppression schemes into law and other attempts to bring more John Birch Society-type laws that are meant to ignite further "Culture Wars", in addition to more attempts to legislate hate and other means of controlling people referred to as the "Other" (i.e., racial minorities, specifically African Americans, who the Right holds its largest hatred towards).

Hopefully at the conclusion of the IRS' investigation the Justice Department will launch a criminal investigation into the activities of both Charles and David Koch.

Friday, April 24, 2015

Okay, let me start by saying that I really don't wish to continually broach this subject, but I need everyone's help to make the BART board of directors make suicide barriers inside every station a top priority. Just this year, an engineer for the system informed me, there's been a total of 6 suicides so far. These tragic events impact everyone, especially when the BART system gets shut down to clean up the mess left behind.

While we should be heartened that BART is doing something about this problem, we need to keep up the pressure. This problem is only going to get worse down the road, especially when the suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge is complete.

Thursday, April 16, 2015

Turns out that on +Facebook there's buzz about a new +Star Wars episode called The Force Awakens, which opens in Theaters on Friday, December 18, 2015. This is post-+Return of the Jedi, and the only sad part is that George Lucas isn't directing it (he said he's done with making Star Wars Films), but at least he's guiding its production. Still, it sucks though, since he's made it a franchise and very lucrative one. Enclosed is a teaser clip from the Star Wars channel on +YouTube.

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

It seems as if the +GOP has yet to find someone credible to take back +The White House these days once +Barack Obama leaves office in January 2017. Then again, credible seems to be a rather high standard when it comes to the Republican Party, because of how low our standards have become regarding them governing us. I think George W. Bush said it best as, "I am the master of low expectations," when it came to regarding the Republicans' ability to do anything other than legislate hate and theft.

But then again, they're a reflection of us in how we're so badly divided in terms of politics and public policy. It's all thanks to the Southern strategy implemented by Richard 'Tricky Dick' Nixon to exploit the growing divisions within the Democratic party following the start of the breakup of the New Deal Coalition. This is why we're starting to see the far-right expose itself

The only thing the Republicans are succeeding in doing these days is showing how they're making themselves politically irrelevant in high-turnout Presidential elections and only making themselves politcallly releveant in low-turnout midterm elections. Not a winning national strategy. Especially not one against Hillary Clinton. Based on polls for now, she'd blow any Republican out of the water with the sole exception of Jeb Bush, at least in a non-rigged election. I'm absolutely expecting that in 2016, the Republicans will not only try to rig the election, but will do so to make sure that their standard-bearer +Ted Cruz wins in a 538-0 landslide, or something close enough to that. Of course, that's wishful thinking on anyone's part. But I'm still under no illusion that the Republicans will do anything to steal elections through various means of fraud and vote suppression just to continue giving their corporate benefactors our hard-earned tax dollars.

Monday, April 6, 2015

It's become a self-fulfilled source of irony to blame Islam and its adherents for all acts of terrorism. 90% of devout Muslims are not engaged in any form of terrorism and will readily denounce the nihilistic, self-serving extremists who hijack their faith to justify engaging in acts of violence. If we think about it, other religions face the same problem of a few opportunistic nihilists hijacking their dogma to justify acts of mass murder and injury.

The real irony of blaming Islam for all terror acts is that more and more acts of mass violence are actually the product of Christian extremists looking to start a new set of crusades. Think of how many acts of violence have taken place from the Americas to Africa, Asia, Oceana and throughout Europe in the name of Christianity. In fact, even here at home in America, there's a big problem with Christian extremists. This article from +AATTP's (Americans Against The Tea Party) website lists 8 Christianity-based extremist groups that are just as extreme, or even more so, than ISIS. It says a lot about why Christianity has become the new hot-zone for terrorists, more so than Islam, and why they Christian terror networks make those based on Islam seem sane by comparison.

Again, to re-cap from before, Islam does have a massive problem when it comes to terrorism, but the extent to which it suffers from it is not as widespread as the mainstream media want us to believe. Most Islamic terror acts are generally between the faith's 2 main sects, Sunni and Shi'ite, more so than with other religions like Judaism and Christianity.